The Doctor's Lair

Made some pulao, forgot the salt, made some dal, too much salt. Saving grace, thank god I forgot the salt in the rice. Net results...Hmmmm, Tasty!

People, am thinking seriously to finally build a website, ok ok, atleast a webpage. I will be hosting it on Methane. So what I am looking for is a web development tool to build a simple and elegant looking webpage. Any suggestions.......

Also, is it me, or blogger seems to be slow nowdays and giving me plenty of errors?

Check this out people. From a concept a few years ago, the simputer has come a long way. Do check out the product here. I especially like the flip flop technology. Coming from out very own desh, truly amazing. Hoping for the price to go down a little more though.

We all know about this epic tale, don't we, thanks to sunday mornings on the dual channel network we once had. Well, here is another interpretation of the same old mythical war epic, in Javanese style with good music and some dance that I did not understand too well. Arriving five minutes before the show, I found that they had converted the closest parking structure into a paid one. Nice way of making money of a free show. For me, the miser in such things, this meant parking some 8 minutes walk away and trekking back. As expected, the main floor was filled to capacity and I had to go up to the mezzanine level which also was filled quite a bit.

The beginning part of the show was the introduction, and by this is was the introduction of all the characters who skipped across the stage as their characters were called out. Not exactly skipping but Javanese dancing, it was all the same to me. Bheem was a huge man and Nakul and Sahdev, the twins, were given twin roles, both doing the same steps throughout the performance. Yudisthir was portrayed by a lady, as most wise men are in Javanese performances. This last piece of information curtsey the narrator, also a very wise person I presume.

The new interpretation was given as mortals being played by the gods, with Krishna on the good side and Shankuni on the evil side and no I did not get the spelling wrong. The evil one was Shankuni and pronounced just as it is written. Krishna incidently also was one of the drum players, so he was skipping between playing the drum and dancing on the stage.

The best part of the performance which I liked was the orchestra ensemble. The complete back half of the stage was full of exotic musical instruments. From big hanging metal vessels in the back which were the bass drums to the xylophone type looking instruments in the front. There were also dholaks and a couple of others which I could not make sense of how they were producing music. The music itself was wavering, the crescendos started slow and were gradually built up and then came down again. Overall, quite enjoyable, especially the music, but a little lacking on the details and an interpretation that I found weird being taught by the sunday morning programs.

Later playing volleyball, I ended up with an injured knee, the severity of which I have realized only this morning.

The saga continues. Me wielding the willow trying to score a few scores to bring victory to our team. And yet again, after again, get the run out, by bad luck or by opposite ends refusal to make good on his original commitment. So that now makes it 4 out of 4 times in the last 4 times, wow a 100% record. Today too, first match the round object decided to ricochet and land straight in the bowlers hand, who very conveniently standing next to the stumps took the bails off. The following encounter I ran two runs all by myself with the same usual result. Every cloud has a silver lining though, I managed 20+ runs in the first match........;-)

The mighty Coliseum.

2MIDI / BASS / MID2XM / MO3 / XM-EXE / XMPlay, as I have found is a very kewl audio player. Its tiny in size (~600K) and does not need an installation. It has just the right number of features that I want and is not bloated like other players are. Even though small, this player packs quite a punch. Features include accurate play, gapless output, interpolation for better clarity while being low on CPU usage, small memory footprint. In other words, it there just for playing music, which if I may say so it does amazingly well. And if you want more functionality, there are tons of plugings to use along, including one that allows for using winamp pluging as well. The only problem with this player is that it is available only for windows and only windows. There is a lot of discussion in the XMplay forums for trying to get it ported to Linux. But with the source code being closed, that's not going to happened soon. (The player is free though).

highly recommended - 4 1/2 stars.